Gunnar Beck

Gunnar Beck is a German academic, lawyer and sometime politician. He served as deputy legal adviser (EU) at the House of Commons in London from 2002 to 2010 and as legal adviser to the UK parliamentary delegation to the Convention on the Future of Europe from 2002 to 2004. From 2014 to 2019 he was a part-time legal and EU affairs adviser to the Alternative for Germany from 2014 to 2019 and then a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2019 and 2024. From 2022 to May 2024 he held the position of vice-president of the Identity & Democracy Group. He has been a reader in EU law at the SOAS, University of London since 2005 and a door tenant and practicing barrister at 1EC Chambers (Chambers of Sir Tony Baldry) from 2013. Beck has both won wider public and academic acclaim, and provoked political criticism in response to, his work on the legal reasoning of the European Court of Justice, the legal and political aspects of the euro and migration crises and on 18th/19th century German moral and legal philosophy, especially the works of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Academic career Gunnar Beck is a specialist in European Union law and legal and political philosophy. He has taught the subject at SOAS, University of London since 2005. He previously taught political philosophy, moral & legal philosophy at Oxford University and EU law and legal philosophy at the LSE.

Political career Beck was a Member of the European Parliament from 2019 to 2024, where he represented the German party Alternative für Deutschland. In March 2022 Beck who belongs to the moderate wing of the AfD, was elected vice president of the Parliament's Identity and Democracy (ID) Group. From 2020 to 2022 he led the ID delegation to the Conference on the Future of Europe.

During his parliamentary term Beck was also a member of other EU Parliamentary committees: Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs ECON; Committee on Legal Affairs; and the Committee on Constitutional Affairs as well as Delegation to the EU-Russia Parliamentary Cooperation Committee; from 2021 he also served on the Subcommittee on Tax Matters. In 2023 he summed up von der Leyen's first term in office by congratulating her on achieving almost all her policy objects, but added that "her remarkable successes would ultimately proved more expensive and disastrous to the peoples of Europe than all the failures of her predecessors taken together."

Academic title dispute Prior to the European Parliament election, it was reported that Beck was listed on the ballot paper as holding a professorship, even though he holds the less senior rank of reader at SOAS. The German Bundeswahlleiter, however, has confirmed that Beck was not responsible for the information on the ballot paper, as he simply entered his first name and his surname without any titles. Accordingly, Beck explained that he had merely translated his British university title and defended his actions as "legally unobjectionable and correct in content." Yet, according to the Ministry of Science and Culture of North Rhine-Westphalia, which is governed by the ruling CDU in coalition with the FDP, the "simple conversion of a British university position into a German title" may not be lawful in Germany even if it is a correct translation of the equivalent professional position of a person.

Works Beck, Gunnar (2013). The Legal Reasoning of the Court of Justice of the EU. Oxford: Hart Publishing. Beck, Gunnar (2008). Fichte and Kant on Freedom, Rights and Law. Lexington Books.